The Guy Who Danced Around the Globe

I finished the first video and put it up on my Web site at the beginning of 2005 in January, and it wound up on some blogs. The media got hold of it, and with all of the media attention, Stride gum found me. They contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in making another video for them for the debut of their gum, which happened in June of this year.

And you said . . .

I thought that sounded like a great idea. They offered to pay for me to travel around the world for six months and go anywhere I wanted. They let me pick the places, and they didn't give me any restrictions other than to stay out of the "axis of evil," which was more to keep me from getting killed. So, in December of last year, I started, and got to go to 39 countries on all seven continents. I finished in June of this year and put the video up on June 21.

How did you pick the places for your second trip?

Antarctica is the kind of place where it's very difficult to go to, and it costs a lot of money, and it takes a lot of time. It was somewhere I figured I'd never have an opportunity to go to, so that was at the top of my list. Also, Easter Island and the South Pacific, Micronesia, the Galapagos Islands.

Which places were the most difficult to dance in?

The hardest dance was on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. I spent nine hours climbing up to the peak, I vomited eight times on the way up and I just had nothing left by the time I got up there. The most complicated to shoot was underwater in Micronesia, diving in front of the propeller of a Japanese shipwreck that was sunk in World War II. That was complicated because I discovered that you can't talk to the camera person when you are underwater. And the most terrifying was on the Kjeragbolten rock in Norway; it's just a tiny rock wedged between two faces of a chasm 3,000 feet up and only a few feet across. Dancing on that rock, yeah, I came very close to killing myself.

In the second video, I noticed that the elephants of Botswana were pretty upset. What happened?

The elephants in Botswana had been rescued from a game park in South Africa and were being culled and sold as pet food. This Sri Lankan man had been living in Botswana and bought the orphaned elephants and kept them on his farm. I spent a few minutes around them trying to get them used to me, but obviously not long enough, because as soon as I started dancing, they made it very clear that they did not want me dancing near them anymore.

Were people inspired to join in your dance?

The only time that happened was in Rwanda. I went out to this village and started dancing, without any explanation of what I was doing. As soon as I started dancing, kids started joining in, and within a couple minutes, all the kids in the village had circled around and we were all dancing together.

Would you encourage people to go tour the world and do a little dance?

Absolutely. It proves the point that I did want to show, which was that there's really nowhere you can't get to in a small amount of time. We're all stuck here together on this small planet.

What's next?

I am still getting over this last trip -- 39 countries in six months was quite a bit of travel, so I'm recovering. But I've starting taking tap-dance lessons. I figured it was time to learn how to dance for real.